Western Railway (WR) will soon be placing devices at various pay and use toilets to get feedback on the cleanliness of the toilets.
These devices will be placed at Bandra, Andheri and Dadar, setting up a trail for around a month to gauge if commuters use it and railway authorities get appropriate feedback.
The devices will have three buttons — ‘Clean’, ‘Ok’ and ‘Dirty’ — which commuters will need to press to register their feedback. All devices will be synced to a common server, which WR officials will be able to access on a real-time basis. At present, pay-and-use toilets with high footfalls have been selected like the one on platform one at Bandra station.
“We want to give commuters a simple way to provide feedback, which will get registered immediately,” a senior railway official said. WR also plan to have a feature with an SMS alert facility to railway staff to ensure that if a commuter presses ‘Dirty’, the toilet can be immediately inspected.
Senior officials plan to ask firms with pay-and-use toilet contracts to procure these machines as they would have a vested interest to ensure that the machine is not vandalised.
WR had last year set up a WhatsApp number to send complaints about cleanliness at station premises and toilets. However, senior officials said that they continue to get ‘good morning’ messages and forwards on the number. If the trial is successful, then WR will install the device at other pay-and-use toilets across the suburban network.
